Saving Cinderella: What Feminists Get Wrong About Disney Princesses And How To Set It Right by Faith Moore

The internet is full of memes deriding the Disney Princesses
and their Princes that we and our parents grew up with. Prince Charming has a
creepy foot fetish, Snow White is a fool who doesn’t know not to take things
from strangers, Belle suffers from Stockholm Syndrome, etc. We all know the
drill. Truth be told, most of us have probably chuckled at them, amused by a
cynical take on a childhood classic. The
problem is that these cynical, superficial takes on the classic fairy tales are
actually taken seriously by many people today. It is now common for movie
critics and cultural commentators to disregard even more modern princesses like
Ariel as nothing more than marriage obsessed damsels in distress.

This is a grave injustice, one that Faith Moore does much to
set right in Saving Cinderella. In her first book, Moore takes these
critics (henceforth to be referred to as PCs, short for Princess Critics) head
on, charging them with a gross and agenda-driven misunderstanding of the movies
that made Disney a household name.

Princess by princess, Moore shows the reader how each one is
far more than she seems, how they aren’t merely naïve girls waiting around for
a man, any man, to rescue them. She gets off to a great start with an in-depth
analysis of Snow White. Far from being a girl happy to wait around for a man,
Snow White is shown as exhibiting a high degree of resourcefulness when she
offers to cook and clean for the dwarves so long as they let her stay in their
home and hide from the Evil Queen. By doing this, Snow White is making use of
her only marketable skills to stay alive. Nor does she necessarily love her
state in life. The Whistle While You Work song isn’t about all the joy
Snow takes in her chores; it’s about distracting herself from the drudgery of
them; she’s actively trying to insert joy into her day.

Even her relationship with the Prince is more than simply
two people falling in love at first sight. The author makes a convincing case
that they likely would have met many times before, but that isn’t even the
point. Snow White and the Prince represent things far deeper than characters on
a screen.

The real heart of this book is Moore’s focus on the nature
of symbolism in fairy tales. In a fairy tale, nothing is only what it is on the
surface. A dress is not a dress, an apple is not an apple, and a slipper is not
a slipper. The characters are archetypes and not necessarily as people living
and acting as they would in the real world. The Princess and the Prince
represent the feminine and masculine ideal. No, not a physical ideal as the PCs
would have you believe. The physical appearance of the Princess and the Prince
represents their character, their virtue. In this way, the dress, the slipper,
all of the external things merely represent who the Princess really is and lets
others see her, the real her. She is a person who is strong, unwilling to allow
her spirit to be crushed by the circumstances of her life. The Princess puts
others first without sacrificing who she is.

PCs, so critical of the early Disney movies, stay on the
superficial level. They only see a glass slipper and a square jaw and then
proceed to judge everything according their own stilted and politically-charged
worldview.

Moore doesn’t stop with a defense of the princesses of old
though. After all, the book is about saving
Cinderella, not defending her. She
goes on to chronicle how Disney has allowed the PCs to basically take over to
the point where filmmakers are now actively and explicitly trying to subvert
the fairy tale formulas that long-time fans of Disney have taken for granted.

Beginning with Jasmine (I would argue that the signs were
actually present in The Little Mermaid) the author shows how Disney
quickly adopted the critiques of the PCs, almost desperately trying to gain
their approval. First, Jasmine is painted not as a graceful, virtuous woman who
inspires her Prince to be better than he is (like Belle and the Beast) but as a
petulant and defiant brat who berates her Prince into the man she wants. Disney
has followed this same road until movies like Brave and Frozen
actively reject the ideal of the Prince, apparently preferring that the
Princess grow old and alone rather than ever find fulfillment with a man (any
man).

For anyone who loves the Disney movies they grew up with but doesn’t know how to defend them in the face of the modern critics, this book is for you.

We are still left with the question – How do we save
Cinderella? Moore’s discussion of Beauty and the Beast and Tangled,
I think, show the way forward. Both of these movies provide a near perfect
blend of fairy tale symbolism and the modern penchant for more flawed and
realistic characters. Both films are easy for modern audiences to relate to
while still conveying all the higher ideals of the older fairy tales. They can also
serve as a key to those older tales, to take the lessons learned within and
reteach the language of symbolism that the modern world has forgotten to our
own children. Then they too can experience the joy we and our parents did when
seeing these films for the first time.

Thus inoculated against the anti-myths of the PCs, perhaps
our own children will one day take up the Shield of Virtue and the Sword of
Truth and use them to create new tales, new myths that draw from and build upon
the old. Not only will they save Cinderella, they’ll create sisters for her
worthy of filling her shoes, or glass slippers.